Dr. Isabel Pedersen, PhD.Founder and Director of Decimal Lab
Isabel Pedersen is Professor of Communication Studies, and Founder and Director of the Decimal Lab at Ontario Tech University. She studies the cultural, ethical, and political challenges posed by technological change through design, adoption and adaptation, concentrating on emergent digital devices. She is the author of Ready to Wear: A Rhetoric of Wearable Computers and Reality-Shifting Media, which explores how carryable, wearable, and implantable technologies impact the ways that people interact with one another and participate in culture. Her Decimal Lab is funded by a Canadian Foundation for Innovation Grant and she has held several Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grants for her research in embodied media and social robots.
Dr. Andrea Slane, PhD
Associate Professor, Associate Dean, Research and Graduate Programs
Faculty of Social Science and Humanities
Dr. Andrea Slane joined the Faculty in 2009 as an Associate Professor in the Legal Studies program. Her research focuses on privacy, data protection, and the variety of legal regimes that protect people from both individual and commercial wrongdoing online and over digital devices. She has a substantial body of work on the flow of personal information over digital devices and platforms. She has also conducted sociological research on the views of professionals who work with victims on online child sexual exploitation, and is currently engaged in a new project examining senior citizens’ views toward new social support technologies such as digital assistants and social robots, and the kinds of protections they feel they need.
Prior to joining Ontario Tech, she was Executive Director of the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law. She received her Juris Doctor degree, with honours, from the University of Toronto in 2003, and was called to the Ontario bar in 2004. Dr. Slane practised trademark, copyright, privacy and technology law at a large downtown law firm in Toronto before returning to academia in 2006. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California in San Diego, and worked as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia from 1995 to 2000.